White Mothers,Brown Children: Ethnic Identification of Maori‐European Children in New Zealand

Studies of multiethnic families often assume the ethnic identification of children with the minority group results from the minority parent. This study examines an alternate view that mainstream parents also play an important role in transmitting minority ethnicity. It explores this argument using data from New Zealand on the ethnic labels mothers assign to their Maori‐European children. It finds that European mothers are just as disposed as Maori mothers to designate their child as Maori, either exclusively or in combination. Two explanations, grounded in ethnic awareness and gendered inheritance, are proposed. Although neither satisfactorily predicts maternal designation decisions, the readiness of European mothers to identify their child as Maori underscores their role in diffusing Maori ethnicity.     

SURVIVE THEN THRIVE: DETERMINANTS OF SUCCESS IN THE ECONOMICS PH.D. PROGRAM

This study investigates the completion of the Ph.D. in economics. We use ex ante information, based upon reviewing individual applications from former doctoral students. Students need different skills to succeed at each distinct stage of the doctoral program. Significant determinants for passing the comprehensive exams include Graduate Record Exam (GRE) verbal and quantitative scores, a Masters degree, and prior focus on economics. By contrast, research motivation and math preparation play significant roles in completing the dissertation. GRE scores become insignificant for completion in the generalized ordered logit estimates, which emphasize the sequential nature of the Economics Ph.D. program . ( JEL I210)     

Self,Emotions, and Extreme Violence: Extending Symbolic Interactionist Theorizing

Extreme violence revolves around actions of individuals who are emotionally aroused and willing to kill themselves, if need be, to inflict harm on enemies. Terrorism, gangbanging, and genocide are conspicuous examples of extreme violence. This violence is ultimately driven by repressed negative emotions about self that are transmuted into variants of anger and combinations of anger with satisfaction‐happiness to produce emotions such as hatred, righteous anger, and vengeance. This theory combines symbolic interactionism's emphasis on identity and self with key ideas from gestalt theories, psychoanalytic theories, and interaction ritual theory as well as data from primatology, evolutionary biology, and neurology. I explain extreme violence as the outcome of several converging forces: the neurological capacity for humans as evolved apes to experience and express a large palate of high‐intensity emotions, the experience of shame in key institutional spheres, the repression of shame (and, at times, guilt and alienation as well as other highly charged negative emotions), the intensification and transmutation of these repressed emotions into variants and elaborations of anger, the making of external attributions blaming external targets for negative experiences, the portrayal of these targets in highly negative terms, and the charging up of positive emotions in interaction rituals directed at inflicting harm on external enemies.     

Sektion Wissenssoziologie

Ohne Zusammenfassung unter Mithilfe von Jule Lorenzen, Sabine Petschke, Lisa-Marian Schmidt und René Tuma     

Wer spielt die Musik?

Media play a crucial role in the development of children and young people, together with the influence of parents, family and peer groups. Looking at an important topic in adolescents’ lives, i.e. contemporary music, this pilot study analyzes the relationship between media and interpersonal communication. Its theoretical grounds refer to the notion of a multi-step flow of communication. Based on a snowball sample of 72 pupils, aged between 14 and 16 and coming from different schools in Germany, 687 relations between respondents and their communication partners could be identified. Interviews were conducted face-to-face and by telephone in 2001. The questionnaire included a network generator based on seven items, an assessment of relationship characteristics and communication roles taken with each partner and several controls such as media use patterns or relevance and expertise in the field of music. According to our results, the concept of opinion leadership can be applied to the roles of pupils in the classroom, and the social network approach allows for a distinct view on their communication patterns. The size of pupils’ networks was between seven and 12 persons in average, most of the networks being dense and consisting of strong relationships. Due to the still important role of the parents, the homogeneity in age and education was rather low. The results also indicate the presence of opinion leaders among groups of adolescents, characterized by central positions within the communication network in class. The case study could identify several roles, e.g. stars, bridges, liaisons, structural holes and isolated persons. On the other hand, there is no evidence for a substantially different type of media use by opinion leaders, which challenges the original assumption of a multi-step-flow of communication.     

The Social Shaping of Emotion: The Case of Grief*

This article addresses the issue of how deeply social arrangements may penetrate into private emotion, in this instance, grief. It argues that the data necessary to address the issue satisfactorily are not available and thus current assumptions in the literature about the universality of the grief experience are at least suspect. However, there are theoretical reasons, derived from interactionist thought, to suspect that if certain components of the grief experience vary, so will the experience. Four of these components are examined (level of significance of the other who dies; definition of the situation surrounding the death; character of the self experiencing a loss through death; and the interactional situation/setting in which the prior three components occur). Evidence is also presented which is suggestive of space-time variation in these components. It is concluded that an assumption of the deep social shaping and thus the variability of grief is fruitful for further empirical inquiries.     

Principal component and correspondence analysis of compositional data: some similarities

Principal component and correspondence analysis can both be used as exploratory methods for representing multivariate data in two dimensions. Circumstances under which the, possibly inappropriate, application of principal components to untransformed compositional data approximates to a correspondence analysis of the raw data are noted. Aitchison (1986) has proposed a method for the principal component analysis of compositional data involving transformation of the raw data. It is shown how this can be approximated by a correspondence analysis of appropriately transformed data. The latter approach may be preferable when there are zeroes in the data.     

School performance, academic aspirations, and drug use among children and adolescents

The relationship between drug use, school performance, and academic aspirations among 446 Anglo and Hispanic youths, age nine to seventeen, is explored. Two groups of subjects--current substance users and non-users--were interviewed. Subjects in each comparison group were similar in age, ethnicity, and gender. Overall results, consistent with prior research, indicate a significant relationship between current school performance, future educational aspirations, and drug use. No difference was noted between substance use groups on indicators of general interest in school work or probability of dropping out of school. Important differences in response patterns occurring with age, ethnicity, and gender were found.     

The therapist at play and the patient who begins to play

This paper addresses the therapeutic challenge presented in the initial phase of therapy by patients who have trouble playing and dreaming, that is, patients who use action-discharge and concrete communication and who show a relative lack of derivative, symbolic communication. An approach is described which conceptualizes therapy as taking place in an intermediate area between inner and outer reality, and in which playing, dreaming and interpretable transference, the vehicles of therapeutic work, can be facilitated. There can be advantages, in some cases, of using such an approach in family sessions. Clinical material is presented from the treatment of an adolescent in her family.